I don’t recall ever operating in the New England QSO Party before, but several emails were circulating encouraging activity, so I thought I’d give it a go. Conditions were OK on the lower frequency bands — not a lot of … Continue reading →

My club, Newport County Radio Club, just completed our third and final meeting on the 40-meter QRP Pixie kit. We packaged the inexpensive Chinese QRP kit with sockets for the crystal and final transistor, two additional crystals (7.030 and 7.040) … Continue reading →

In our continuing quest to evaluate the output purity of various QRP kits, Willy W1LY constructed a Bill KA1QYP Half Pint Kit. The assembled kit produced a solid 600 mW output and was one of the cleanest radios we’ve seen. The … Continue reading →

This is the schematic of the 7-pole LPF used in the QRP Labs 40-meter LPF: The plot from Elsie 2.77 for the above filter looks like this: The actual SA response curve looks like this: The curves are remarkably similar. … Continue reading →

NCRC had several reasons for building the Pixie as a club project, and getting it on the air is probably at the bottom of the list. Fixing flaws in the Pixie design provides learning opportunities. But by the time you … Continue reading →

As has been noted in several posts, the stock Pixie 3-pole filter is hopelessly inadequate to suppress harmonics. A typical Pixie will have a 2nd Harmonic that is only about -21 dB down from the carrier. An external 5-pole filter … Continue reading →

On Semiconductor has a variant of the old 2N2222A in a plastic case called the P2N2222A and characterizes it as a small signal RF amplifier. I picked up a few samples and ran three of them through the Pixie. In … Continue reading →

A friend of mine, Paul K1YBE, gave me a QRP Labs 40-meter Low Pass Filter Kit. The kit came with three T37-6 cores, some #28 wire, 4 caps, a tiny PCB, and a couple of headers. Normally used with one … Continue reading →